King Sugar

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Prompt 2 – King Sugar
Sugar, Caribbean’s most valuable commodity, sugar was the only thriving commodity and all of Europe wanted in on it. King sugar, ruled and revolutionized the economy in the Caribbean; bringing rise to mercantilism and then capitalism through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sugar ruled the economy and brought profit; profit that led to competitors wanting land and the triangular trade; the increased production of sugar and African slaves.
Old Europe was a monarchy. Following the order of “Estates of the Realm”; the board social orders of society, people were distinguished as three estate/social classes: the clergy, the nobility, and commoners. This order applied to every social function, every trade, and grouping. With nobility only stating orders and planters had other ideas besides tobacco; the economy was heading to a downfall. In William’s text:
The cultivation of tobacco gave the Caribbean planters their first taste of the capricious world market. The taste was not pleasant. The Council of Virginia protested to the Privy Council in England against tobacco cultivation in the British West Indies...By 1639 the European markets had become so glutted that prices fell alarmingly. Accordingly British and French planters in St. Kitts agreed to cease planting for a year, tried to get the Dutch to collaborate, and turned their attention to cotton and indigo. With the later they were unsuccessful, while the crowded conditions of the islands made cotton cultivation difficult.
This led to the end of monarchy era to mercantilism. The Dutch came to Barbados, sugar was crowned as the crop to grow and the ration of arable to salves went from 17 to 1, to 5 to 4, an economic rising (Williams 112).
Mercantilis...

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...n:
Market economics with a comparatively aggressive, destructive, globally disastrous form of economics that at its inception took undeterred greed as its focus rather than supporting and further expanding the free market development that mercantilism had begun.
Success was what lead to wars and increased enslavement, and they took pride in that. “Great is sugar and it will prevail”, the motto that mercantilists and capitalists followed (Williams 153).
King Sugar controlled the economy in the Caribbean Islands, leaving behind the ruling of rulers in profits, liberation of the people, and soon after the rise of corporations; the new order and revolutionized the economy. Dominating in power and growth in profits for the Kingdom gave rise to to greed, competing for power, increase of slavery and production; all because of the wealth producing commodity that is sugar.

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